Eat that GW believers!

[Luzr]

MSimon,

What will throw the whole thing into reverse is a situation where CO2 is rising and yet global temps are falling. If that happens (IMO it is happening) the whole house of cards will collapse.

What would you say to a very very hot 2010 (including a very warm or mild winter)?

Funny thing is that this thread will likely still be around at the end of winter

Seriously, right now, it does not seem like mild winter.

The very idea that all climatologists are manipulating the data is so inconceivable to me that if it turns out to be true (and the verdict will come out either way; though those politicizing it and ranting about it on blogs, internet forums, and on pundit filled TV will be forgotten), ALL SCIENCE will have to be looked at, analyzed, and then ultimately thrown out.

Well, not really. I would say not even climate science.

IMO, the big part of the problem is doomsday journalism. If you exclude that crap, even IPCC stuff does not look that much completely invalid.

I have never heard this suggestion before except from those who believe in luddism and who think that science is the great satan.

I think you are coming at overshoot conclusions. For me, the AGW question is about fixing and defending the science.

It seems though here with our engineers that, well, science is right only when we agree with it (see: Polywell).

I think that there are too many electrical engineers and programmers on this forum that have the real experience with programming, measurement errors and feedbacks.

E.g. if you would ever built and tested electronic circuit with positive feedback (say old fashioned AM reciever) and then you would be said that our climate has strong positive feedback, you would immediately started wondering how is it possible that biosphere survived on this dangerous planet for so long...

[Josh Cryer]

MSimon, I'm not going to play the whole weather game, just fyi. I mean I could say "the south experienced 5 years of drought" but I don't do that because I don't think local weather variability is indicative of long term climate trends.



Luzr, do you really think 3C (best estimate) for one doubling equals a strong forcing? It's not that the forcing is strong at all, it's that we put 30 billion tonnes of it into the atmosphere annually (going to rise to about 50-60 billion in 20 years, thanks to China and India).

This is why CO2 forcing wasn't even measurable until the mid 90s, we simply weren't putting enough of it into the atmosphere.

BTW, I was talking about the winter of the 2010-2011 cycle. I know this winter is particularly bad for some places, though I do suspect it will end early and we won't have a real spring (we'll go straight to summer temperatures).

[MSimon]

Of course it is just weather.

No warming for about 10 years. And the NH is having a terrible start to winter.

Eventually weather turns into climate.

But what you can't deny is that in 2006 NO AGW proponent ever said anything about the trend going flat or cooling for a while.

And yet in 2006 some Russians predicted cooling based on solar observations. They say 40 or 50 years of cooling. The head of the IPCC says warming (a lot of warming) after 2020. Cooling until then.

In any event: no data - no case. Because if you can't replicate it is not science.

And if it is CO2 then you are being screwed by China and India. US output is flat compared to their rate of growth.

So without the Russian evidence or CRU evidence we will just have to wait to see which predictions come true.

What pleases me to no end though is that generally faith in science is declining. Excellent. Because science is not about faith. It is about evidence and prediction.

Or as AGW proponents like to say: "It is worse than we thought"

I might note that at minimum the ARGO buoys show no ocean heat gain (or minimal) since 2005. When the PDO went negative. In fact according to some there has been a slight decline. The buoys can't find the heat the AGW proponents said was in the pipeline.

Of course I don't expect you to change your mind one bit. But I'm not writing this for you.

Also: If you go back in history to about the late 1890s you will see hot scares followed by cold scares alternating in a roughly 30 year cycle. A cycle which matches the PDO cycle. And the PDO went negative in 2005. That says a cooling scare will be due about 2030 or so.

In the mean time the cooling snap of the last few years has greatly eroded the faith. Excellent.

[MSimon]

E.g. if you would ever built and tested electronic circuit with positive feedback (say old fashioned AM reciever) and then you would be said that our climate has strong positive feedback, you would immediately started wondering how is it possible that biosphere survived on this dangerous planet for so long...

I built one of those a few years back. Great fun. Real twitchy though even when using a 10 turn pot for feedback control. What was lovely that the Q (selectivity) went up as the feedback increased. Just as theory predicts.

And the close you got to feedback >=1 the twitchier the radio got.

[Luzr]

Luzr, do you really think 3C (best estimate) for one doubling equals a strong forcing? It's not that the forcing is strong at all, it's that we put 30 billion tonnes of it into the atmosphere annually (going to rise to about 50-60 billion in 20 years, thanks to China and India).

This is why CO2 forcing wasn't even measurable until the mid 90s, we simply weren't putting enough of it into the atmosphere.

Sorry, Josh, but check the physics please. The forcing of CO2 is logarithmic. That is why everybody is speaking about doubling - because second doubling forcing is the same as the first doubling.

BTW, I was talking about the winter of the 2010-2011 cycle. I know this

As I said, I give it 5 years. By that time, I will make the final judgement

[IntLibber]

MSimon, I'm not going to play the whole weather game, just fyi. I mean I could say "the south experienced 5 years of drought" but I don't do that because I don't think local weather variability is indicative of long term climate trends.



Luzr, do you really think 3C (best estimate) for one doubling equals a strong forcing? It's not that the forcing is strong at all, it's that we put 30 billion tonnes of it into the atmosphere annually (going to rise to about 50-60 billion in 20 years, thanks to China and India).

This is why CO2 forcing wasn't even measurable until the mid 90s, we simply weren't putting enough of it into the atmosphere.

BTW, I was talking about the winter of the 2010-2011 cycle. I know this winter is particularly bad for some places, though I do suspect it will end early and we won't have a real spring (we'll go straight to summer temperatures).

The claim by the alarmists is that one doubling equals 1 C directly from CO2 and 3 C from H20 in positive feedback.

Firstly, 1C from one doubling is excessive and not proven by the observed data. One reason this is faulty is that the diminishing returns curve is much more restrictive than that. The data shows its more like 0.5C per doubling, if that.

Secondly, the claim that H20 vapor is an excessive positive feedback, which creates this high sensitivity in the signal to CO2, is false and all the observed data says that H2O vapor is a negative feedback due to cloud formation, albedo increases, etc. Theres dozens of sets of observational data looking at this issue and it all says that water vapor behaves completely to the opposite of that claimed by the alarmists who claim water will add 3 C to the warming.

[MSimon]

This is why CO2 forcing wasn't even measurable until the mid 90s, we simply weren't putting enough of it into the atmosphere.

But even the believer scientists say the "forcing" of CO2 is 1degC per doubling. The other 2 to 5 degC is due to water vapor amplification.

If water vapor is such a multiplier putting more of it in the atmosphere by burning CH4 has got to be a terrible idea.

[MSimon]

Firstly, 1C from one doubling is excessive and not proven by the observed data. One reason this is faulty is that the diminishing returns curve is much more restrictive than that. The data shows its more like 0.5C per doubling, if that.

My take on this (alluded to in your second part) is that WV is a negative feedback term. Thus cutting the expected CO2 warming in 1/2.

[Josh Cryer]

3C per doubling is the best estimate with taking H2O, etc, in to account. Note, one doubling is something like 600 ppm, which we'd hit in about 20 years (due to the fact that our CO2 emission growth is exponential, again thanks to China and India).

[MSimon]

3C per doubling is the best estimate with taking H2O, etc, in to account. Note, one doubling is something like 600 ppm, which we'd hit in about 20 years (due to the fact that our CO2 emission growth is exponential, again thanks to China and India).

Complaining to the already industrialized world then is useless. And I can tell you that China is sitting on a powder keg. They HAVE to keep improving their standard of living or face political turmoil that they are not prepared to handle. The cheapest way for them to do that is coal. Why? Because the initial capital costs are low.

BTW ERBE satellite data says the WV multiplier is .5 (+/- .1). Which says that a quantity of CO2 that would nominally give rise to a 1 degC increase gives .5 degC in the system.

[MSimon]

BTW Josh,

You still haven't explained the missing upper atmosphere hot spot.

[TallDave]

The very idea that all climatologists are manipulating the data is so inconceivable to me that if it turns out to be true (and the verdict will come out either way; though those politicizing it and ranting about it on blogs, internet forums, and on pundit filled TV will be forgotten), ALL SCIENCE will have to be looked at, analyzed, and then ultimately thrown out

Heh.

First off, we're talking about maybe a dozen, two dozen people with their thumbs on the scale. It's not a conspiracy, just activists pushing a POV. Some of this has been proven (Mann, Jones, Briffa), more is probably out there.

The next decade will probably be about .1 degrees warmer, just as the average trend has been since about 1850 or so. The people pushing AGW will have the same models and arguments they have now. Nothing will be resolved.

All this will have absolutely no impact on real science, which generally doesn't involve wildly exaggerating the reliability of computer models to achieve a political result.

[Luzr]

3C per doubling is the best estimate with taking H2O, etc, in to account.

Ah, but then you are speaking about sensitivity, not forcing.

[IntLibber]

3C per doubling is the best estimate with taking H2O, etc, in to account. Note, one doubling is something like 600 ppm, which we'd hit in about 20 years (due to the fact that our CO2 emission growth is exponential, again thanks to China and India).

Complaining to the already industrialized world then is useless. And I can tell you that China is sitting on a powder keg. They HAVE to keep improving their standard of living or face political turmoil that they are not prepared to handle. The cheapest way for them to do that is coal. Why? Because the initial capital costs are low.

BTW ERBE satellite data says the WV multiplier is .5 (+/- .1). Which says that a quantity of CO2 that would nominally give rise to a 1 degC increase gives .5 degC in the system.

Actually, the models the alarmists use treat 260 ppm as the baseline, so a doubling is 520 ppm. We are at 390 or thereabouts atm, which is half way. Given the log curve, a 50% increase should account for .66 deg warming (since its a diminishing returns curve) based on alarmist claims. Unfortunately there isn't .66 C of anomaly. Anomaly is averaging less than half that.

Yeah, some of that is negative feedback of water vapor which cancels out some of the CO2 forcing, but calculating water vapor feedback is very touchy, cause water vapor is a coolant (negative feedback) during the day, but a positive feedback at night cause it traps heat from escaping to the night sky. What water vapor tends to do is moderate temperatures so that lows are not as low, and highs are not as high, with a slight bias in favor of the cooling effects because it keeps sunlight out of the climate in the first place. Ideally you want more clouds during the day and less at night, which tends to happen in winter because as temps drop water vapor precipitates.

Now, a lot of people are confused about all the snow and cold lately, but its pretty simple, and it is part and parcel of the below average arctic sea ice coverage. The more arctic sea that is open water in winter the more water vapor gets into the atmosphere (thus helping the ocean cool and lose heat content). Since wintertime in the arctic is dark as the sun is below the horizon most or all of the time, this gives the ocean a channel to radiate tons of heat to space, particularly when windy storms whip up that crack the ice up and open more water.

Putting all that water vapor in the air in the arctic does keep the air there a little warmer, but given its -35 normally, thats not a big deal, its not going to melt anything in the winter. The water vapor does, however, blow down to the south and snow on everything, which is why theres been snow blanketing Europe and the lower 48 states, with snow in southern italy and the french riviera for the first time in many many decades. This increases planetary albedo, which causes more sunlight to be radiated back to space, which provides further cooling to the planet.

Better hope we dont get another Pinatubo eruption just now, the SO2 it would dump in the equatorial atmosphere could kick us into a little ice age for a century or more.

[Josh Cryer]

BTW ERBE satellite data says the WV multiplier is .5 (+/- .1). Which says that a quantity of CO2 that would nominally give rise to a 1 degC increase gives .5 degC in the system.

That was debunked recently in a paper, wasn't it?


Anyway, I found this preprint today:

Atmospheric Variations as observed by IceCube

http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0776

Apparently a neutrino detector deep in the antarctic has a secondary use to measure the temperature of the ozone layer. When the analysis is done and over with they conclude:

In Figure 5 we overlay the IceCube muon rate over the temperature profiles of the Antarctic atmosphere produced by the NOAA Stratospheric analysis team[11].We note that the anomalous muon rates (see, for example, the sudden increase by 3% on 6 August 2008) observed by IceCube are in striking correlation with the middle and lower stratospheric temperature anomalies.

Clearly Serap Tilav, Paolo Desiati, Takao Kuwabara, Dominick Rocco, Florian Rothmaier, Matt Simmons, and Henrike Wissing are all part of the conspiracy.